American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant covers the Civil War extensively. As I’m not a Civil War scholar, however, and it is a big and familiar subject, I’m not going to say too much about it except the book is worth reading.
According to the author, contrary to what his political opponents said during his lifetime, Grant was not a drunk. He may have overindulged in booze while stationed at a lonely Oregon outpost before the Civil War. This possibly led to his resigning from the Army. There then followed a period of failed efforts at making money in the private sector, which might have driven Grant to drink but did not. Once back in the Army and while serving as President, he was abstemious by the standards of the day.
As during other wars, it was hard to suppress Americans’ commercial spirit:
Northern Illicit Trade for cotton angered Grant. By the Civil War, cotton had become the indispensable lifeblood of the Southern agriculture that grew it and the Northern manufacturing that processed it. Cotton was to the nineteenth century what oil would become to the twentieth century. Union coastal and river blockades were put in place to deprive the South of necessary staples, but Northern businessmen were more than willing to break the blockades in order to exchange all manner of goods covertly for Southern cotton. The problem, as Grant observed in Memphis, was that Northern goods did not go just to sustain civilians, but to supply the Confederate army. As Sherman wrote Grant, “We cannot carry on war & trade with a people at the same time.
War could be chaotic and inglorious then as now:
The Second Corps, which had been commanded by Stonewall Jackson—who was accidentally shot and killed by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville—was now led by Virginian Richard Ewell.
Abraham Lincoln is portrayed as a near-saint by the author, though my friends who didn’t go to K-12 here in the U.S. tend to think of him as a tyrant seeking to maximize power.
“Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend.” It was an intriguing opening to an unusual request Grant received that same month: “Without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service,” could Grant find a place for twenty-two-year-old Robert Lincoln, a recent graduate of Harvard, on his staff? Although the letter did not mention Mary Lincoln, behind the request lay a family struggle involving a son who wanted to join other young men serving in the war, a mother who had already lost two sons and feared losing a third, and a father caught in the middle. Grant replied, “I will be most happy to have him in my Military family in the manner you propose.” He suggested the rank of captain. Unwilling to make the U.S. Treasury pay the bill, Lincoln bought his son his military outfit and equipment as well as a new horse.
Grant was gracious in victory:
As Grant started back to his headquarters, news of the surrender spread like wildfire. Spontaneous firing of salutes exploded everywhere, but Grant immediately sent an order to stop all such demonstrations. “The war is over; the rebels are our countrymen again.”
What did it cost to keep North America as home to three countries rather than four?
When the North and the South went to war, the United States population stood at barely more than thirty million. For that small nation, the accepted total of deaths in the Civil War stood at 620,000—360,000 from the North and 260,000 from the South—far and away the largest toll of any American war. Now, new research using digital census data from the nineteenth century has revealed that the acknowledged death total was far too low. It is now accepted that the Civil War cost the lives of nearly 750,000 men—20 percent higher than the original total
I do wonder if it was worth it. Slavery ended everywhere else at close to the same time, usually without bloodshed. Whenever I point out that Singapore is richer than the U.S. people are prone to say that it is due to them having a smaller population. Canadians seem happy. If being part of a population of more than 300 million is so great, why don’t the Canadians try to join up?
More: read American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant.
Control over the Missouri and Mississippi watershed is far too geopolitically important to have ever allowed an independent south. Confederate control over New Orleans was never a long term option.
“Canadians seem happy. If being part of a population of more than 300 million is so great, why don’t the Canadians try to join up?”
Rhetorical, right?
We fought our own little battle to keep that from happening. Burnt the White House down, as I recall. Should have sown the town to salt as well.
In modern terms, Grant was a reformed alcoholic like George W. Bush.
Does the author have anything to say about General Order No. 11?
That’s weird about Lincoln. Having been U.S. born and educated, I’d never heard any alternative to the secular saint viewpoint, except from “The South Will Rise Again”/”Northern Aggression” types in the south, which we tend to discount. Where does that alternative idea hold sway?